Opinion
Wurzbacher: Carbon removal will match today's oil and gas industry in size
“What we are talking is the creation of a new industry of the size of today's oil and gas industry. That that's basically it.”
Assertion Supported
Wurzbacher: Direct air capture is 1,000x more area-efficient than trees
“If you build machines like we are doing, you can do it on much, much less area. So you are about a thousand times more area efficient. So at the same area where you can take one ton out of the air with trees, you could take a thousand tons out of the air with …”
Assertion Supported
Wurzbacher: Injected CO₂ turns into stone underground within two years
“They have developed this method where they inject the CO₂ in underground porous rocks, where the CO₂ is mineralizing with the rocks, so within two years, the CO₂ is just turned into stone there”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2029
Wurzbacher: Direct air capture will reach million-ton scale by 2030
“This industry is set up to scaling up to the million tons per year scale in the next couple of Years towards the end of this decade. So that's what will happen. We are doing that like a handful of other companies are working towards that.”
Insight
Wurzbacher: Reaching gigaton-scale carbon removal requires government mandates and taxes
“95% of the population Would likely only do this when they are forced to it. And that's eventually to get to billions of tons of CO two removal. We need regulation. We need corresponding legislation. We need governmental procurement programs that might be CO tw…”
Assertion Supported
Wurzbacher: Removing 10B tons of CO2 via trees requires Europe-sized land
“If we just do the calculation, what about capturing these ten billion tons of CO₂ from the air just by planting trees or doing similar biological methods, then you'll end up with huge areas that you need to fill with new trees. It's like you need something lik…”
Insight
Wurzbacher: Selling captured CO₂ to beverage makers has zero climate benefit
“Like, in terms of climate effects, that market is totally irrelevant. Like, is that a market? Could you grow a sustainable business on that? Yes, sure. So you, we could have decided just to become a small, medium-sized company developing direct air capture pla…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wurzbacher: Direct air capture will scale and drop in cost like solar
“And that's the same, what has had to happen in our industry, and I'm sure that will happen over the next
two decades to come.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wurzbacher: Capturing 1% of emissions requires 750,000 shipping container-sized units
“You would need something like 750,000 containers for that, which Is that a large number? It's actually not a large number. It's actually what goes through Shanghai port in two weeks, right? It's like, it's not a lot compared to global economy.”
Disclosure
Wurzbacher: Climeworks is building a capture plant 10x larger than Orca
“Like, based on that, we are now building a 10 times larger plant.”
Assertion Supported
Wurzbacher: Capturing one ton of CO2 requires filtering 2M cubic meters of air
“Like to take a ton of CO₂ out of ambient air, you need to filter around two million cubic meters of air.”
Assertion Supported
Wurzbacher: Climeworks sold its first captured CO₂ to greenhouses and Coca-Cola
“Our first Plant we built here in Switzerland, and that is taking, that's still an operation, that is taking CO₂ out of the air to then sell the CO₂ to a greenhouse. They are fertilizing their plants with CO₂, and also to Coca-Cola, who are making sparkling dri…”
Assertion Supported
Wurzbacher: Climeworks' Orca plant captures 4,000 tons of CO2 annually
“Everyone has eight containers, so that ends up then with a total nominal capacity of, ah, 4000 tons of CO₂ per year that can be captured.”
Assertion Supported
Wurzbacher: Climeworks has surpassed 14,000 direct individual subscribers
“We've had since beginning over 14,000 customers, and that's increasing”
